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Sunday, March 14, 2010

Goldberg's rhetorical ruse

Jonah Goldberg, while promoting his ahistorical book redefining fascism as a form of liberalism Liberal Fascism, has noted that it's terribly significant that Hillary Clinton has said that she considers herself a progressive rather than a liberal.

A non-movement conservative ideologue might have simply viewed Clinton's choice to be indicative of the success of the decades long campaign of Goldberg's ideological predecessors (including his mommy, who got him his job) to turn liberal into an epithet that no politician wants to be labeled with (see Talking Right for an analysis of the topic.) But for an ideologue like Goldberg, inhabiting a Manichean world where movement conservatives are Good and everything else is Evil, Clinton's identification as progressive exemplifies the fact that she's really a totalitarian fascist like Mussolini and Hitler.

A generation after Ronald Reagan and his allies turned "liberal" into an epithet, conservatives are going after the term many Democrats adopted in its place. Glenn Beck and his paranoid Fox News Channel ranting is just at the forefront of what appears to be a movement to demonize the word "progressive," in hopes of scaring voters away from the left. "Progressivism is the cancer in America, and it is eating our Constitution," Beck told thousands of adoring fans at the conservative CPAC conference last month. "And it was designed to eat the Constitution. To 'progress' past the Constitution." The National Review ran a whole special issue on progressives in December; staff writer Jonah Goldberg even published a book on the subject, "Liberal Fascism," two years ago. The latest ad for Liz Cheney's new group, Keep America Safe, prominently features Attorney General Eric Holder declaring that progressives are about to run the nation -- before seguing, sharply, into asking whether Holder's pals share the values of al-Qaida.

Democrats could identify as Fraggles and I expect that Jonah Goldberg and his lunatic disciple Glenn Beck would start explaining how Jim Henson was fascist and/or communist who hated America and created Fraggle Rock as part of some sinister plot to rule the world or something.